Blogging in the wind

Internet Blog Serial Number

This is the IBSN (Internet Blog Serial Number) I selected for this blog:

A brief introduction: «The IBSN (Internet Blog Serial Number) was born on February 2nd, 2006, as an answer to the Spanish administration's negative to grant an ISSN to Internet blogs. The ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) and the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) are numeric identification codes».

Credits to: «Fernando Tricas García, fernand0, when he read the post in José Ángel García's blog explaining the institutional negative to grant an ISSN to blogs, thought of the IBSN».

Go, go, go! Get your own!

Les Blogs chat and tag cloud

I will be arriving to Paris this Sunday and will be attending Les Blogs 2.0 conference. If you want to meet online before the conference, I've created a chat room in Freenode: #lesblogs (irc.freenode.net). If you have Chatzilla installed go to irc://irc.freenode.net/lesblogs

By the way, I have also added a tag cloud and tag aggregation to Planet Les Blogs 2.0. The feature is not optimized and is a bit slow.

I will be in Paris for two weeks to work with my pals at Six Apart French office. I live in Canary Islands and we wear t-shirts almost all the year. The downside is I have few clothes for intense cold... I must buy some before the trip!

tags: lesblogs

Planet Les Blogs 2.0

Based on a reincarnation of my Planet Express script and Stuart Mudie's feed list of Les Blogs 2.0 participants, I've setup Planet Les Blogs 2.0. It shows the entries posted in the last 24 hours, but the database contains several days now. The feeds are scanned every 15 minutes. This is my first app using Django, a Python web framework, similar to Ruby on Rails.

I think this is a great way to discover people and opinions in advance. See you all in Paris!

Tagzania: Folksonomies for Google Maps

Luisxto Fernández wrote me yesterday to alert me the launch of  Tagzania. It's a web app that merge two of the most exciting technologies: folksonomies and Google Maps. Tagzania is very similar to del.icio.us, but instead of bookmarking pages, it allows you to bookmark places in Google Maps.

After you sign up in Tagzania you can install a bookmarklet. Imagine that while browsing by Google Maps, I want to bookmark Plaza de Oriente in Madrid. I double click on it, click the bookmarklet and I get redirected to the new entries' page in Tagzania. On the left, the map is shown and on the right I fill the title, description and tags fields. Save and voilà.

As in del.icio.us, entries can be filtered by tag but they can also be displayed in Google Maps, i.e. all entried with tag «madrid» in list mode and in map mode. Tags are also syndicated.

It's a wonderful new world. Imagine that users bookmark restaurants all over the cities. Then, I could go to Tagzania and filter the restaurants in New York: tagzania.com/tag/ny+restaurants (anyone yet). Of course, in the description you could even add a comment about how good is it.

The enterprise that developed Tagzania is CodeSyntax, from Vasque Country. They are experts in Zope. and of course, Tagzania uses Python, Zope and MySQL. They also launched the Tagzania's weblog. Weeks ago they also presented another Google Map-based web app for San Fermines (famouse bull races in Pamplona).

Kudos for CodeSyntax. I really love the idea and implementation and I'm waiting the minutes before they get slashdotted.

Gay marriage approved in Spain

BlogPulse discusses Will you marry me in Spanish? (vía Fernando).

«Six of today's top links refer to the Spanish parliament's 187-147 vote legalizing gay marriage, leading to cries of Way to Go Spain!  and Viva Espana! from LiveJournal bloggers and some thoughts on Catholicism in the latest country to legally recognize same-sex unions. Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero is today's burstiest person, with a not-so-happy Antonio Martinez Camino, spokesman for the Spanish Bishops Conference, a close second».

Yesterday, I went to the wedding of my cousin. It was a civil wedding, hosted by one of the city's political representatives, of the same party of Primer Minister, Zapatero. In Spain, this law was passed with all but right-wind votes (Partido Popular). Many religious associations opposed the law and organized some mobs. They argue this will destroy the family and gay couples shouldn't be allowed to adopt children. However, 70% of Spaniards are ok with gay marriage, and currently, single people -including gays, of course- can adopt. This law doesn't require Church to marriage gays, not even turn everybody in bisexual. Kidding, we asked ourselfs yesterday whether the representative weren't marriaging our cousin because he was heterosexual... but just kidding ;)

I think this is a good step forward a more open society and it makes me proud of being Spanish. State and religion shouldn't say anything about whom you prefer to share your love and life. Just do it!

MSN Spaces: 1 million blogs in Spain

According to this note in terra.es (Spanish), based in a press release:

• MSN Spaces claims more than 15 million blogs around the world.
• With 1 million blogs, Spain is the top 3 country. Top 1 is US (2.5 millions) and UK (1.5 millions).
• Spain is the fastest growing country.
• Spanish users are the most active of all.

Coincidentally, last Friday I begun to spider last updates page in MSN-Spaces (ES_ES) for the Blogometro. The script has discovered 18,000 blogs since then. It's full of teenagers, specially girls. It's not that bad, considering the service opened in Spain in April 7th.

Madrid bloggers meetup with Joi Ito

As Joi says: Madrid bloggers meetup March 12 21:00.

«Victor is organizing a bloggers meeting on Saturday in Madrid. I'll be going. Anyone who wants to come, please sign up on the wiki page. It is on Saturday 12th, March 2005 at 21:00. The location is La Giralda restaurant, Calle Maldonado 4».

See you there!

Weblog programming in Linux Journal

I was a regular subscriber to Linux Journal years ago, but I forgot renew the subscription after a change in the credit card number and never did it again. Specially, I loved Reuven M. Lerner's column At the forge, dedicated mainly to Perl and web programming. Taking a look to the open archive, seems he has been covering blog development. Here is the compilation of the links to that articles.

• COREBlog
• Blosxom
• Xoops
• Slash
• Weblogs and Slash (user's journals, we use this in Barrapunto more openly than in Slashdot, but are feature-limited).
• WordPress
• Syndication with RSS
• Aggregating with Atom
• Aggregating Syndication Feeds
• Bloglines Web Services

There is no article about MT, but if you want a good introduction to MT plugin development, you can take a look to Timothy Appnel's Developing Movable Type Plug-ins.

Slashdotted

Business Press Pays Attention To Blog Industry.

"Right after Business Week named WebLogs, Inc. one of the five Net companies to watch in 2005, the Associated Press has a feature on SixApart, the company behind Movable Type, Typepad and (after acquisition) LiveJournal. The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general."

Look, ma, we are in Slashdot! ;)

Fire in Madrid's skyline

On Saturday night, the 8th's biggest building in Madrid (Spain) started to fire.

About the building
The Windsor is a 32 floor building, 106 meters high. Was opened on 1979 and it is placed in the very bussines center of the city, not far away from Santiago Bernabeu (Real Madrid's stadium), Torre Picasso (157m) and just next to El Corte Inglés (the Spaniard Wall-Mart, I was there two weeks ago looking pretty PowerBooks ;) 20 floors of the building were occupaid by Deloitte & Touche which also suffered the lost of their offices in Twin Towers (skycrapers seems to be a risky bussines nowadays) The top floors of the Windsor were under re-construction.

About the fire
It started around 11PM, local time on 21th floor. It was probably caused by a short circuit. No injured or deaths reported. The building was almost emtpy. The top floors partially collapsed at 3 :30 AM. A full collapse is not ruled out, but as time goes by, the probability is lesser. The fire didn't completely cease until Monday (today). It won't be re-constructed. The major of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón, said that will be probably slowly dismantled. This will take at least 6 months and 20 million euros.

Blogs & the city
There are a number of blogs in Spain that covered the event. Bitacoras.com and 20minutos.es had two comprenhensive lists. You can see some pictures in Broco, Nociones de vida, Enekyn, Freedreams, Weblog de un friki (photogallery) and Intrepido (phogallery). Other photogalleries are available in traditional media, like El Mundo and 20minutos.

Madrid competes as a candidate city for 2012 Olimpic Games.